Against my better judgment I weighed in on the issue of pricing/who to sell to and how. I've gotten really good deals on some bottles I wanted to try, and I've made money when I re-sold those bottles after careful thought and found that they totally failed on me, no matter how much I wanted to like them. I have Snow White 2004 in mind here. I've also lost a lot of money in my obsession, by eating shipping costs, reselling bottles at significantly lower prices than I bought for, and in some cases selling underpriced bottles because I wanted to. On balance, I'm still hugely in the red as far as my obsession goes. The concept of 'profit' is utterly alien. For me, the cost is worth it for the delight of sniffing so many scents -- but that doesn't change the fact that it's money I'll never recoup. I don't think I (or anyone else) should be criticised for trying to decrease our losses as much as we can. There are people who try to squeeze every last dime that they can out of their BPAL -- I'm not one of them, nor I believe are most people who sell at higher than they bought. There are other ways to give back to the community, like offering special discounts for n00bs, or selling them things that you'd otherwise only swap away. I've done the latter, and I've seen and applauded people doing the former. You're also not obliged to sell to just whoever comes your way -- if someone pings you and says "I really really really want this bottle" you can take them at their word and offer it to them, even for a discount if it's what you think is fair.
On the subject of ebay, stop bellyaching about letting the market decide what to pay for things. If you don't want to pay $100 for a bottle of perfume, then don't! It's just perfume! If it matters that much more to someone else, then let them have it and keep quiet. Either shell out the money and lose the exact same amount of options they do*, or realise that if you lose the auction, you'll live.
In my own swapping, I tend to favour first people I've dealt with before. There are a couple of people (Chrisann comes to mind) who are just a joy to deal with, and a few more that I've dealt with so many times that I give them preference because of how good they've always been to me. After that, I tend to deal with people who have a good reputation in the community and n00bs. If I find someone who /really/ wants a scent, I like to give it to them if I reasonably can -- I sold an imp of Beaver Moon that I wanted to save for swaps, because the gal was a newbie and I know how hard it is to break into the market and what you usually have to shell out to do so. But the BPAL community /isn't/ a free market -- it's a heavily controlled market, both by price caps in most selling venues and the politics of the fandom. That's good and bad. The good part is, it limits pure profiteering, and ensures that by and large the emphasis is on enjoying scented art instead of narrowly reducing each purchase to a risk/benefit analysis. The bad part is, the politics of opinion are fierce and a little paranoid, and if you're a rare collector building strong relationships is much more important than it should be. The field of people who hold real rares is small, and the people willing to swap those rares is even smaller. It's a microcosm of the world, impacted more intensely. I'm out of rare-collecting, mostly; I sold off most of my rares a while ago, and those that I've kept are for the purposes of briefly testing, then dangling out as bait for the few scents I collect heavily.
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*I tend to think of money in terms of how many options you give up when you lose it or give it away. Money is worth different things to different people, some people have more or less, and some people have to work much harder than others to scrape together much less. But it's much easier to compare how much freedom or what kind of options a sum of money gives you, since those are much closer between different groups of people.
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